ABSTRACT
Urban architecture places buildings in the urban environment; urban design is the intersection of urban architecture and policy. Urban design research is by its nature interdisciplinary. It involves architectural goals, urban economics, and metropolitan societal aspirations, and political agenda. The intersection of these three spheres of influence offer a fecund opportunity for researches that engage the configuration of the public realm and its implications for policy development and evaluation. Urban design includes: 1. social concerns regarding the definition of the public realm and the support of its citizens, 2. environmental performances concerned with the impact of the city on its natural context and its hinterland, 3. institutional concerns with direct responses to the political and economic forces that impact community living, and 4. phenomenal concerns for the image, texture, and scale of the pedestrian space. These are open areas for documentation, speculation, and evaluation of the relationship between policy and design. This chapter describes the opportunities for urban design research that include quantitative analysis, social sciences, and political action. Winston Churchill’s famous quote, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us”, is a reminder of the social responsibilities that designers and architects must respond to. Architecture is the vessel and background for human interaction, but so little has been done to quantify and qualify the criteria by which this happens. This chapter lays out the definition and responsibilities of urban design as a strategy of documentation, its intersection with the community, its use of skills associated with the exigencies of political, economic, and environmental forces, and the opportunities that urban design can employ for the amelioration of pedestrian spaces.
